As airport and other security gets increased attention we are likely to hear a lot more about biometric technology like fingerprint and iris scans. I had hitherto been quite enthusiastic about using these until I read a cogent forwarded email analysis of their usefulness and drawbacks by a man who has worked in the security industry for several years (republished by permission).

Coming war threatens to split the left (according to the no-doubt-gloating New Republic).

As you can probably tell, I am apprehensive about the consequences should the US simply bomb Afghanistan and/or Iraq. But I think it is misguided for those on the left who are opposed to the American support for Israel or its interventions elsewhere in the world to use this opportunity to rub America’s nose in its mistakes. To say that the terrorist attacks are no worse than what America has done (directly or indirectly) to Iraqi or Lebanese civilians is both wrong and counter-productive.

The Detroit Free Press has published a useful and easy to read guide to Arab Americans (Detroit contains a large Arab minority). It points out (among other things) that Iran is not Arab, that most Arab Americans are not Muslims and Bedouin are no more than 2% of the overall Arab population. America’s Public Broadcasting System (PBS) produced a miniseries about Islam with accompanying website (mostly about art, it seems) some time ago.Thanks to Yahoo’s Picks of the Week for these links.
The BBC World Service has also produced a guide to Islam – one of its guides to the six main religions in the world today.

Sometimes Salon can be so obvious. A piece on “terror sex“? I can imagine the editorial meeting – “OK we’ve done the serious stuff, now what’s the sex angle to this?”. Next I suppose will be an article on how the military could have caught the terrorists if only they used more open source software?

Could the post-hijack clues be hoaxes? If you are feeling in a conspiratorial frame of mind, the private spies at Stratfor point out that the otherwise meticulous conspirators reportedly left behind pictures of Bin Laden and Korans. They say, “A likely possibility is that the hijackers intentionally left material designed to provide the FBI with an obvious trail leading to low-level operatives with limited knowledge of the attack or its sponsors. While authorities are preoccupied on this investigative track, the real masterminds of the attack could flee detection and plan more operations.”

When can we laugh again? I have just received by email the first joke based on the events of 9-11 and it was funny (at least to those who would understand it – it was also very geeky). But I didn’t feel it appropriate to forward it or put it up on my site – it just seemed disrespectful. It turns out that traditional humour outlets in the US are facing a similar problem. “At the Onion, Hanson said one of the headlines under consideration for its groundbreaking issue, in the publication’s mock-newspaper format, is: “Report: 82 percent of Americans staring blankly at hands.””